Epistemic Status, this whole thing exhausts me but I think Nonlinear do get to ask me to take seriously this evidence. I would really like to be able to edit this as people respond, but y’all hate that, so I dunno. But I will probably change my mind on at least1point (80%) and clarify at least 3 if we have a big discussion (90%)
Tl;dr
Edit I didn’t update much from the original piece and so I didn’t update much on this one either. I think this makes my views quite weird tbh.
Nonlinear was likely a hard-mode place to work but I’m not sure that’s awful
Nonlinear seem to move pretty quickly from collaborate mode to conflict mode. Quicker than I do, at leastCEA, LessWrong and funders get to decide who they let in and who they don’t. A boundary against behaviour like this for a org to be represented at EAG doesn’t seem crazy to me.
This evidence updates me a little
That nonlinear are less “a bit dishonest” and more “technically honest, but very hard to negotiate with”
The suing thing looks even worse than I thought, given how I don’t think that relevant info is deeply wrong. (edit—to me, threats of legal action are a huge escalation, but others less so)That Pace
couldshould have given more timeas a show of good faith,but frankly, I don’t think it would have worked and I don’t know when the suing threat came. Once that was out, I probably endorse publishing
Takes that matter to me from the original post:
Are Nonlinear controlling, particularly frame controlling?
Are Nonlinear accurate in their speech—when they say they’ll do something, will they do it?
Will Nonlinear use threats to get what they want?
Meta takes that actually matter to me
Did Ben Pace do a fair job here?
Evidence and counter evidence on those takes
Frame control
Evidence that I care about
The stories from Chloe and Alice painted a picture of Non-Linear. A close, ambitious, high-stress, often renegotiated environment.
Others agreed with this, and those that had a rosy view of Non-Linear didn’t seem to push against this narrative
My view on finishing the first article
I am not sure this amounts to frame control. I said a similar thing at the time. But I do think that many people might not want to work with Non-Linear and Non-Linear should be careful who they hire.
Nonlinear should have a reputation for being high stress, tough and not for everyone. Nonlinear shouldn’t have a reputation for being a safe place for people who don’t know themselves really well to work.
Evidence from this new article
I don’t see a lot of it. In fact it sort of seems to make it even more likely to me.
When the response to a complaint about being exhausted and working on a weekend, seemingly involuntarily, Is this, I see a lot about boundaries—Note the Non Linear team have written this, not Chloe
“My boss offered me an all-expenses-paid trip to the Caribbean island St. Barths, which required one hour of work to arrange the boat and ATV rentals (for me to enjoy too). But it was one hour on a weekend, so I complained, and it never happened again.”I agree that this isn’t the worst thing, but I can imagine that Chloe felt pushed into doing work she didn’t want to do and that everything was up for negotiation. Seems very plausible
Even now, small details from the original account have been elided, this from Chloe, “We had guests over and the team with the guests had decided in the morning that it’s a good vacation day for going to St Barths. I laid low because I thought since I’m also on a weekend day, it would not be mine to organize”
“Emerson approaches me to ask if I can set up the trip. I tell him I really need the vacation day for myself. He says something like “but organizing stuff is fun for you!”. I don’t know how to respond nor how to get out of it, I don’t feel like I have the energy to negotiate with him so I start work, hoping that if I get it done quickly, I can have the rest of the day for myself. ”
Yes, I would not work here. Sounds exhausting. But she had agreed and was paid. I employ people and if I felt like I were pushing someone to this extent, I would feel uncomfortable. But adults do get to choose where they work.
But we also get to choose who we recommend. I think I’d make caveats before recommending Nonlinear, but that also doesn’t mean I think they have been unacceptable. Feels like we need some new categories here. I would call them a medium to hard difficulty company, not for players new to the game.
I don’t really care that Alice seemingly lies a lot. Chloe’s account seems solid and when we get to the nitty gritty I always seem to find this same thing—events where I wouldn’t want to be Alice or Chloe
My current views
I think I think that Nonlinear was not a criminal or awful place, but it asked a lot of people and those people, given time and space to reflect, might have left earlier than they did. I guess it’s great for some and terrible for others.
Nonlinear have some duty to ensure that people who will hate it don’t get employed by them.
They seem to agree:
“Nevertheless, some things we are doing differently are:
Not living with employees & all employees being remote.
Not using that compensation structure again.
Hiring assistants who’ve already been assistants, so they know they like it.”
Accuracy
Evidence from the original piece
Some anecdotes about Emerson being calculating, deceptive
My views on finishing the article
It maybe updated me a little on them behaving badly
I already thought Nonlinear were willing to solve problems in whatever way seemed best to them. And I don’t always know that I think that’s bad. I like there being different approaches. But communities can decide that something is too far for them.
I am not sure that I would advise people employ Nonlinear unless they want this kind of problem solving.
I find the Emerson was intimidating in business deals a pretty weak update because it’s like 3rd hand at this point. Hard to know what happened
Evidence from the new piece
Seems that some of the anecdotes about Emmerson were informed by bits that were taken out. Not sure how to feel about this. Clearly those examples weren’t loadbearing for Pace, but I guess I update back a bit
The pay stuff does seem pretty inaccurate. Saying [these things were equivalent to $70k] doesn’t mean you paid someone $70k and a lot of the discussion is about control.
Likewise it’s starting to look like [you can pay yourself what you want] never meant the person had control over the money. And that’s a big difference.
My current views
I wouldn’t be super surprised by some bad behavior and dishonesty and I don’t think Nonlinear are at my “top tier honest accurate” standard. Probably they aren’t at my “normy person” standard either. More like my “interesting wheeler dearler, be careful but not actively hostile” standard.
As someone who likes freedom to act, I can imagine the costs of this reputation to them. But I don’t see a lot against it. And sometimes you want a hard knuckle problem solver.
Threats
Evidence from the original piece
Nonlinear threatened to sue
Kat’s messages
My views on finishing
Yeah that’s kind of threatening and bullying
Evidence from the new piece
It does seem pretty plausible that Alice does this a lot (60%?)
If I’d read that article and felt as Nonlinear feel I probably would expect huge damage. But, as above, I don’t really feel that Pace has been hugely wrong so far on key elements. So I think the suing was too far.
My views
I agree that there should be a way to push back, but the pushback has to actually be relevant to the disagreements at hand. Since I don’t believe Nonlinear are the worst, just kind of hard-mode employers, a lot of this pushback feels unnecessary.
I have had people say saddening things about me. I’ve been in the headspace where I was hurt and annoyed about what someone was saying about me and wanted to confront them.
I don’t endorse saying things like “companies do not hire people who speak ill of their previous employer” (link). It is possibly true, but it is just so, I dunno, off. Whine to your friends, talk to the LessWrong/Community Health team. At the point where I am trying to do lessons about who to talk to to someone who is upset with me, I find that’s a huge red flag and these days I talk to my therapist and I kvetch to my close largely non-EA/rationalist friends. A lot. I want to be credibly not-lashing-out in such situations. This doesn’t look like that.
I think the suing suggestions moves this really adversarially. It’s such a huge gamble and I don’t think they had the cards to back the bet. I think it should still be seen as a big negative against Nonlinear, I guess worse now, even.
Ben Pace
Evidence from the original piece
He had put it up giving Nonlinear a couple of days to respond
Spencer said there were some big issues
My views after the first piece
I empathised with Pace, especially given the suing threats. If someone is threatening me, I can see the temptation to push that beyond my control to back down on
Evidence from the new piece
Here are the most substantive disagreements, in my view:
Alice as a bad actor
Pace does make clear that Alice is sometimes dishonest.
Nonlinear gestures at a set of stories that paint alice as doing this all the time.
I dunno. I guess I think Alice can behave pretty badly and so can Nonlinear. The question is whether she lies about stuff that matters.
Housing
Pace: “Everyone lived in the same house. Emerson and Kat would share a room, and the others would make do with what else was available, often sharing bedrooms.”
Nonlinear “Strange, false accusation: Alice spent 2 of the 4 months living/working apart (dozens of EAs can verify she lived/worked in the FTX condos, which we did not live at)”
I guess that when they travelled the world, where most of the stories come from, they did live apart from others, but yeah, a bit
Family
Pace: “Alice and Chloe report that they were advised not to spend time with ‘low value people’, including their families, romantic partners, and anyone local to where they were staying, with the exception of guests/visitors that Nonlinear invited. Alice and Chloe report this made them very socially dependent on Kat/Emerson/Drew and otherwise very isolated.”
Nonlinear: “Bizarre, false accusation given that Alice spent 1 of the 4 months with her family Kat encouraged her to set up regular calls with her family, and she did.”
Both stories can be true. Again I can imagine that sometime Nonlinear too pains to really care about the needs of employees and sometimes they didn’t. I guess I’d have liked the addional context here, though Pace made clear that he was only providingthe worst stories
My views after the second piece
Yeah maybe Ben could have given them a week,
but I don’t see that my views have changed much and it does seem like Nonlinear would try all sorts of shenanigans in that week.The threatening to sue also would make me want to publish quickly also, (edit but it’s less clear to me that I endorse this)
Nonlinear spent 3 months writing a response which has not moved me much, so I don’t know how a week would have helped.
Ben seemed to do a fine job. This does seem like info that should have been out in the open. Perhaps people are over updating on it, but I guess I think that’s on people. I never thought Nonlinear deserved to be shut down and I still don’t
(edit If you read it and thought that Nonlinear were the worst then maybe you have more of a grievance against Pace, but equally that seems bad on your part)
Summary of response
I continue to think that Nonlinear is a hard place for many people to work. I update a little away from Nonlinear being a bit dishonest to them being technically honest, but misleading, but not such that I’d never work with them (though I’d give caveats to others). I move a little towards thinking Pace should have given more time, but only a little.
My key takeaway here is that much of this damage seemed done already. By how they responded to this and my own experiences, I believe that there was a tax on discussing issues about Nonlinear. This isn’t unique to Nonlinear, there are others who I think behave badly but about who it is costly to share info. I am sure others think I behave badly, people have told me they think I suppress bad info about me. It’s a hard problem. I think Pace’s original article was less bad than many options. I hope funders still feel able to fund Nonlinear if Nonlinear will do work they want done in a way they are happy with.
I don’t think there was much trust between Nonlinear and Pace, Alice, Chloe and others. Seems this was always gonna be hard to resolve, I guess I push that fault more on Nonlinear, but I’m pretty uncertain. 60% maybe?
What next
My general view is that people should get the reputations they deserve and if they want different reputations they should credibly change. Personally, Nonlinear’s reputation as a non-standard move fast and break things org seems pretty reasonable. Also their new reputation as only techinically honest and overly threatening also seems fair. To change that I guess they might want to apologise for the threat to sue, acknowledge ways in which staff weren’t making choices that enlightened versions of them would have and talk about how they will do things differently or how these things didn’t happen.
Other notes
The fact that their response is so long and doesn’t seem to focus on cruxes is also a sort of broad problem here. it suggests Nonlinear don’t really understand Pace or me (not that they should, but they really haven’t convinced me). I don’t have much hope for resolution.
I don’t respond to a lot of the other stuff here because I don’t think it’s relevant.
To me this reads as a person caught in the act of bullying who is trying to wriggle out of it. Fair play for challenging him, yuck at the responses.